Godless
by beepybeetle
Summary: The Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And a young trainer, seeking his Great Perhaps is about to take his first step into a changing and dangerous world. Side story for my main fic IAL, mainly focused on OC and combat
1. Introduction

**Godless**

Just a quick intro… this fic will tie in with a later chapter of my current main fic, if you will, I am Legend. This is more of a side project for myself, and it'll follow my two OCs in IAL and provide some background. This story is definitely going to be **M** because I will have gore and lots of it since my OC is a military officer and does see combat… let the blood flow forth

All characters and situations are false. I do not own Pokémon.

Ash and Dawn play minor parts in this story, I listed them because that may change. However like I said, this is just a side story really.


	2. Chapter 1

**Godless**

Fifty-nine years. For fifty-nine years I have known this Earth and have been seeking the Great Perhaps. The story of my life is not one of joy or of privilege. Rather, it is one of suffering and of pain, but also of the strength to overcome it. And this is it.

I sat around my fireplace, comfortable and safe at home. I have had guests over for the last few days, five young Pokémon trainers with infinite potential within their finite spans. I sit with my wife of over thirty years as I recollect my past events. The nightmares and the brief moments of sunshine. A young, raven haired boy asks, "So Erik, now that we've given you a summary of our lives, why not tell us about you?"

I jokingly reply back, "Well, I'm a narcissist so you better be ready for a long story…"

I was born on the first day of the new century. A millennial. The time I was born into was a turbulent time. The world had just left behind the horrors of the twentieth century, but in 2000, many of these memories were still fresh in the minds of many. My early childhood is something shrouded in fog and mystery. I remember so little and brought few memories with me from that time, in photos or in flesh. I am often told that I rarely laughed and cried even less. I learned to walk and speak early on but did not do so often, preferring to keep to myself. From early on my parents had high expectations of me. I was raised by a tiger mother whose impatient personality and short temper clashed with my calculating and cool nature. I lived very much to the beat of my own drums, fiercely independent and proud. We never kept a Pokémon in our house, with both my parents at work late, they did not see the point. I learned to take care of myself at an early age and in case something went FUBAR, I learned to get off my ass and fix it.

When I started school, nothing other than the best was accepted from me. I had no problems getting As but the way my parents went about _encouraging _me was what ticked me off. They're constant yelling at me and other verbal abuse slowly broke down what little emotion I had in me. Even slight mess ups were not allowed. I once got a B in handwriting and as punishment, I was forced to stand facing a wall through an entire night. At that point, my sleep deprived ten-year old brain could not understand why someone would force this upon me. As my grade levels began going up, the consequences for messing up grew bigger and bigger. Yelling and abuse became common as I learned that my ninety-three in math was not good enough to get into a good university. As the stakes went up, my resentment grew as well.

I found an escape in Pokémon. My first was an injured Fraxure, that had somehow stumbled into my school. I was in seventh grade and it was during lunch when the supervisors in the lunch quad began screaming like the semi-evolved proto humans they were. The dragon stumbled its way over to where I was sitting alone in the lunch area outside. It stared intently at me, its eyes burning with a passion I knew too well at that point, revenge. I expected the dragon to attack, but no such move was made. There was a connection between two injured souls and something clicked.


	3. Chapter 2

**Godless**

Following the Fraxure incident, I began to travel, first competing in small, local leagues in the U.S throughout the summertime of that year. I began to gather experience and also, the money I won in these leagues helped finance my interests and my ambition of becoming a Pokémon trainer, a dream which my parents did not support. But I was fine with that. By the end of the summer, I had accumulated enough wins to become something of a local celebrity, though I knew it was in my best interest to return to school.

Eighth grade was a tremendous year for me. I had come back from my little summer adventure, now with a big scary Haxorus and a new partner, Genesect. I began to make some friends when I decided to start a small battling group which would go out and compete at local tournaments on the weekends. But I also began to notice this girl…

Of my seven classes, I shared five of them with her. We always somehow ended up sitting together and she even joined the small battling group we had started, since she was a coordinator and had some experience with battling. She was beautiful, with her wavy, black hair, beautiful complexion and gorgeous eyes, and even her name, Lorraine was pretty. But there was something more than just her looks that drew me to her. While my friends had long told me I wasn't bad looking or overly weird, I still thought I had no shot at her. But somehow, through fate or through luck, we ended up together following a long conversation after our battle group had finished its practice.

Not long after, school was out once again and this time, with Lorraine, hand in hand, we set off to the far-off Sinnoh region. She competed as a Pokémon coordinator, while I began training to become a Pokémon trainer. We made a lot of good memories in Sinnoh such as capturing a Darkrai which had been tormenting a town and the befriending of a Latios and Latias. Latios eventually joined my growing party, while the Latias opted to join Lorraine. It seemed to be a nice coincidence that a young trainer couple had stumbled upon a Pokémon couple. Throughout the summer, we grew tremendously as trainers. At the Sinnoh league, my team, now comprised of a Genesect, Haxorus, Latios, Darkrai, Heracross and Alakazam swept all before it, earning us our first official League victory. The winnings from the league were tremendous and for the first time, there was more money in my pocket than I had good uses for it. My sweetheart had also done well, placing as number three at the Grand Festival that summer.

Upon our arrival back in the US, in time for High School registration, I received new of my father's death. It never really impacted me, as at that point, my parents' constant abuse had turned my heart to stone, a cold prison for all emotion. My mother decided to return to China, where she had originally come from after graduating college, leaving me back in the U.S alone because she did not agree with my career choice. But I was fine. The tremendous winnings I brought back home allowed me to flat out purchase a house in the same neighborhood Lorraine lived in and still let me set hundreds of thousands of dollars aside for whatever may happen. Following my parents' departure, I met Lorraine's family. Both her parents seemed to adore me as did her (much older) sisters, both of whom were medical students. They became my adoptive family, often times Lorraine's mother cooking a week's worth of food for me and insisting I keep it so that I wouldn't be burdened with the chore and could instead focus on school and on my Pokémon.

It was in highschool that I made the biggest decision of my life. I decided on joining the military. The high school Lorri (nickname for Lorraine) and I went to had a massive ROTC program. I joined out of curiosity and was soon pulled into its arms and willingly accepted its embrace. The program offered me a second family, a second home and I soon became more and more involved, while of course insuring that my normal school work never lagged behind. The stories our instructors had to tell about their service fascinated me to no end and I decided to pursue a commission as a United States Marine Corps officer after highschool and college. Lorri decided to continue on with her coordinator career, as she was quite something already. I had also not completely abandoned my Pokémon master dream yet, since every summer, Lorri and I would go somewhere different and sweep the League and the Contests off their feet. We became celebrities, representing the ferocity and beauty needed in both battling and coordinating. With the endorsements we did outside of school and official League winnings we would take home, we had a very real and very lucrative source of income. Life was good. Battling by day, summer work in a hotel at night. It was the life.

We graduated Salutatorians, two out of eleven total people to have the same overall cumulative weighted GPA, just a tenth of a point lower than our Valedictorian. It felt amazing to know that the hardest twelve years of our young lives had come to a conclusion. I had managed to snag a Naval ROTC scholarship and would be heading to UCLA while Lorraine managed to get a free ride to a beautiful trainer academy which was just a thirty minute drive away. We lived in a nice little flat near her school, commuting via Pokémon to our campuses. However, with the immense amount of summer activities that ROTC forces upon its participants, especially the Marine option cadets, we did not spend our summers together like we used to. I was usually away or preparing for some activity (OCS, I can't wait) so Lorraine spent time perfecting moves and continuing to do endorsements, something which I did only during weekends or spring break. Following a rather grueling six weeks at OCS, I was officially commissioned as a USMC Second Lieutenant. A few months at The Basic School and boom, I had earned my sword. I decided to go with M.O.S. 1802, a USMC Armor Officer and spent the next few months over at Fort Knox to become certified with the Abrams tank. After completion, I was reassigned back to California, at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, but instead of getting a platoon of tanks as I had hoped, I was given a set of silver bars and put on the gunnery range as a lead gunnery instructor, tasked with making sure every gunner on the entire base was ready for combat in the case of a national emergency. And it looked like we were pretty damn close to one. By the time I had been reassigned to Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, there was trouble brewing abroad. Situations in Eastern Europe and alleged missile attacks by North Korean weapons against US ships in the Sea of Japan escalated already high tensions in those areas. Many Marines were being deployed to bases near these so called hotspots."

I looked over at the raven haired boy. "Want me to go on? It gets gruesome fast."

He turns and looks at his friends and replies, "Sure we don't mind a late night horror story."

"That's the spirit Ash."


End file.
